


Kintsugi

by branwyn



Series: Harold and Grace [2]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Caretaking, Dadmin feels, F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kill Them All, Protectiveness, Sickfic, The Machine loves Grace almost as much as Harold and anyway it found her first, she is all that matters, tw for the American health care system
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:47:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22793488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/branwyn/pseuds/branwyn
Summary: If anyone should ever hurt her, Harold will probably destroy them.
Relationships: Harold Finch/Grace Hendricks
Series: Harold and Grace [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1638700
Comments: 12
Kudos: 38
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	Kintsugi

**Author's Note:**

  * For [st_aurafina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/st_aurafina/gifts).



Many people—perhaps even most people—would be delighted to learn that they had unwittingly inspired the devotion of an obscenely wealthy man twelve years their senior. Unluckily for Harold, he doesn’t think that Grace is one of them. 

When their courtship escalates, in mid-February, from regular coffee dates to regular dinners, Harold is careful not to take Grace to restaurants that will draw unwelcome attention to their income disparity. Harold Martin, freelance software engineer, isn’t nearly so oppressively wealthy as many of his other personae, but he does own a brownstone in Washington Square, while Grace makes do with a walk-up apartment in Brooklyn. 

The many small penuries of her existence pain him deeply; the temptation to obliterate them with money is immense. Perhaps when she’s known him a little longer. She’s been occupying real estate in his head for more than two years now, so Harold sometimes forgets they haven’t even been dating for two months.

On a cold but sunny afternoon in early March following a week of rain and strong wind, Harold takes a cab to Kirkwood Children’s Home, where Grace volunteers every other Monday. They’ve arranged it over text that he will pick her up and take her to lunch. When he arrives, however, the rather stone-faced person behind the partition glass informs him that Grace didn’t arrive for her shift that morning, nor had she called in.

It isn’t at all dignified, how quickly and completely Harold panics, how many dire scenarios zip through his thoughts in the time it takes to pull his phone out and call her. 

_No one knows about us,_ he reminds himself. _But what if she’s caught me in an inconsistency. What if she doesn’t want to see me anymore._

“Hey, I’m here, sorry!” Grace picks up on the second ring. She sounds dreadfully hoarse, and Harold’s first shameful thought is, _oh thank God, she’s sick._ “We were gonna have lunch! I just woke up, I’m so sorry.”

“Are you okay?” he asks, climbing back into the cab, giving the driver an address. “You sound like you might be a bit under the weather.”

“No, no, I just didn’t hear the alarm go off… Wait. What time is it?”

“Just past noon.”

“Good lord.” She sounds bewildered. “I never sleep this late. I don’t know what’s wrong with—” There’s a sound like something hollow bouncing on a tiled bathroom floor. “Dammit.”

“Are you _sure_ you’re not sick?” 

“I don’t know. I just knocked a basket of hair doodads all over the place while I was trying to find the thermometer.” She pauses, and her voice takes on a worryingly dreamy quality. “Do I even have a thermometer?”

Harold hesitates, struggling against his own selfishness. It wouldn’t be right to invite himself over. She sounds vulnerable, and who knows whether she’s truly ready to have him in her home yet.

“Grace, is there anyone who could come and look in on you? Perhaps if I were to give them a lift? I’m in the neighborhood.” He’d be happy to give them a ride, certainly. Possibly also a background check.

“Oh, no.” Flat, instantaneous denial. “I mean, thank you, that’s really thoughtful, but I don’t need anyone coming over just to fuss.” 

“Mm.” Harold takes out his laptop and begins making arrangements for a delivery from a local pharmacy. “That would be marginally more convincing if you didn’t sound as though you’d been gargling sandpaper, you know.”

“Hey! I can gargle sandpaper if I want to!”

 _Oh God, I’m in love with her, aren’t I?_ he thinks, without a lot of surprise. Even her bleary belligerence is hopelessly endearing.

“I bet you’d enjoy a nice cup of ginger tea a lot more,” he says cajolingly. “Maybe with lemon and honey? It really wouldn’t be the least inconvenience for me to pop over, make sure you’re stocked up on tissues and orange juice and the like.” 

She’s silent for a full thirty seconds, then makes a sort of growling noise. “You’re gonna be sorry you offered,” she mutters. “I’ve got dust bunnies over here the size of tabby cats.”

“Well, I’m really a dog person, as we’ve discussed, but I’m sure I’ll manage.”

She hangs up on him. A few seconds later, she texts him her address. Harold already gave it to the driver, but simply having a thing, he discovers, doesn’t feel nearly as good as it being given to him.

Half an hour later he’s standing at her door. The security in her building really is nonexistent. 

_Have arrived,_ he texts her.

 _Door’s open,_ she texts back, and Harold is so horrified that he practically lunges inside her apartment so he can lock up behind him.

Grace blinks at him from the kitchen table, swathed in an enormous fluffy robe that’s soft grey with white polka dots. “How’d you get here so fast?” she demands.

Harold freezes. “Well, traffic was fairly light—”

“Weren’t we just talking?” She frowns down at her phone, and sways very slightly in her seat, and suddenly his stomach drops. 

Of course he hadn’t been _pleased_ to learn that Grace wasn’t feeling well. But the prospect of caring for her had, admittedly, thrilled Harold to his toes. 

When it comes to Grace, he sometimes feels like he’s washed up on the shores of a new country, stripped of all his money and accomplishments, a pauper with nothing but his wits to recommend him. On an ordinary day, the utmost he’s permitted to give her are dinners that cost less than what he tips the valets when he has lunch with Nathan. So there’d been a certain spring in his step as he climbed the five flights of stairs to her apartment, laden with bags of pharmacy items.

But now he’s here, actually seeing Grace in her robe, with her flushed cheeks and vague, fever-bright eyes, and he’s—yes, he’s panicking again. He wants to take out his phone and order a helicopter transport to Mt. Sinai. This isn’t a fantasy where he finally gets the chance to play hero for her. She’s _actually sick,_ blinking at him like she can’t quite remember where he came from, and for a second all he can do is absorb the immutable fact of his own helplessness. It’s not as if he can wait till her back is turned and slip a virus $100 to go find another immune system. 

He’s cold all over, goose flesh prickling down his arms. He sets the bags down in the kitchenette and sits next to her at the table, attempting his best reassuring smile.

“I’d ask how you are…” he says.

“I’m good,” Grace informs him.

“Of course.” He wonders if she might be hallucinating. “I picked up a few items on my way here. Including that thermometer you weren’t sure you owned.” From the bag, he takes out an infrared digital thermometer, placing his thumb over the two hundred dollar price tag. “Shall we take your temperature? Can’t hurt.”

“Okay,” says Grace. She takes his wrist and lifts his unresisting hand to her face. For a moment, Harold registers nothing but surprise, and the way the smooth shell of her forehead fits perfectly into the curve of his palm.

“Oh my God, you’re burning up,” he bursts out. 

Spurred to efficiency, he springs to the kitchen and locates a sharp knife to cut away the theft-proof, nearly consumer-proof plastic casing on the thermometer. A few seconds later he’s reading a number off the digital display. 

“You have a fever of a hundred and three point five,” he says, feeling more flustered than he can remember being since the night Olivia gave birth and Nathan told him what they’d decided Will’s middle name was going to be. “Grace—”

“Hmm?” She looks up at him trusting, unfairly pretty—the fever’s put roses in her cheeks. 

He swallows. Then his eyes fall on her laptop, lying on the far side of the table. “May I?” he says, not quite waiting for her reply before opening it. 

(Her system isn’t even password protected: oh, his _heart._ )

“Just doing a little googling,” he narrates. “Okay, you should take some acetaminophen, which I’ve got in my bag of tricks here, and then if the fever doesn’t start to go down, we need to get you to a doctor.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” she says airily. 

“But—” He looks at her, dismayed, not sure how to contend with this statement. 

“I’ll take the Tylenol,” she says reassuringly.

“That’s a start, but if you—you have a pretty high temperature, Grace.”

“I know, it’s just, I don’t have health insurance.” 

She says it patiently, like she’s explaining to a child. Harold, smarting with his own ignorance, feels a bit like one. He takes a breath, and busies himself removing the safety seal from the pill bottle.

“Medicine, then,” he says.

Grace swallows two tablets and half a glass of orange juice without complaint. Harold wonders if he should suggest a cold shower—but that’s hardly going to appeal in this weather. She’s already shivering in her robe. Maybe cool cloths to the forehead would acceptable.

“Do you have any—” he starts to say, only to realize that she’s leaning towards him across the table. A moment later, she presses her sweet, slightly acidic lips to his. 

Harold shuts up immediately.

So far, their courtship has been proceeding at the pace dictated by Regency-era decorum. Which Harold finds charming, truly. But he’d be lying if he said she didn’t...inspire his imagination. 

Still she—she’s not really _compos mentis_ at the moment, and he’s not sure this is—

“Harold,” she says.

“Yes?” he breathes, caught between fear and longing.

She looks deeply into his eyes. “I think I might be sick.”

He deflates slightly, even as the corner of his mouth twitches up into a helpless smile. “Yes, you are, a bit,” he says, daring to brush a strand of hair behind her ear.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she says seriously.

“O-oh?”

“I don’t want _you_ to get sick.”

“No need to worry. I purchased hand sanitizer and disinfectant spray in bulk. How are you feeling, honestly?”

Frown lines score her smooth brow. “I sort of hurt,” she says. “Not a lot, but all over. Like the day after you tumble down a staircase.”

Harold blinks. “Can’t say I’ve ever done that.”

“Or the day after you go white water rafting.” 

“Haven’t done that either. What a sedate existence I seem to have led.”

“I’m pretty gross.” Her nose wrinkles. “Did I shower? I should take a shower.”

“That’s probably a good idea, do you need—” He pauses, considering his choice of words. “Perhaps you should leave the door slightly ajar. In case you get dizzy.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” she says. “The lock’s been broken since I moved in.”

She sweeps off, apparently still energetic; if this is flu, she’ll be laggard soon enough. On the other side of a flimsy door about five feet from where he’s sitting, the shower sputters to a start with a groan of pipes. 

Alone in the aesthetic clutter of Grace’s tiny living/dining room, Harold contemplates his naivete and solipsism.

Until now, his anxieties about losing Grace have mostly centered around self-inflicted disasters: Grace discovering what a liar he is and leaving him in disgust, or merely losing interest over time in Harold Martin and his dull little foibles. Or in the worst case scenario, she’d be swept off the sidewalk and into the back of a dark vehicle with government plates, to be questioned by people in cheap suits about a man whose name she wouldn’t recognize.

Yet somehow, Harold had neglected to be frightened of _this_. Of the corruptions of the flesh, Grace’s own innate fragility. Such is her magnetism that he frequently forgets what a tiny mortal package she inhabits. Harold tends to judge himself against men like Nathan, towering and broad-shouldered. But next to Harold, Grace is the merest wisp of flesh and bone. If disease were to ravage her, it wouldn’t have much territory to conquer before all was laid waste. If anyone were ever to lay hands on her—

He stands up, and begins puttering meaninglessly around the room.

There’s a knitted throw blanket crumpled on the floor. Harold folds it and drapes it neatly over the back of an incongruously lovely antique armchair. There are water glasses in progressive stages of emptiness scattered everywhere, as if, for the last couple of days, she’s been feeling dehydrated and distracted in turns. He returns these to the kitchen, then places them, and a lone plate and fork, in the small dishwasher.

Upon discovering that the dishwasher does not work, Harold sets his mouth determinedly and gets down on his hands and knees until he discovers the stopped line under her sink. Five minutes later, the dishwasher is purring like a kitten, and triumph surges in his veins. 

Grace is much tidier than he is, though he makes up for it with housekeepers. She has the kind of taste that can imbue even a dingy, undersized apartment with charm and warmth. Something about the colors, he thinks, and the arrangement of the sparse, mismatched yet comfortable furniture. The paintings on her walls—surrealist, impressionist, pre-Raphaelite, and contemporary—are all cheap reproduction prints, mostly unframed, but they are still beautiful. The whole room is filled with colors, shapes, and textures that harmonize and soothe and gratify the eye.

It would be hard for money to improve this place. The building is too old; it would need to be gutted, entirely remodeled, and even then the surrounding murk would creep back in. Moving somewhere else entirely would be a better investment. The only thing that could possibly make a room like this comfortable is—that unnameable quality that Grace possesses in such abundance. 

At length the water stops running. She appears in the bathroom doorway in her robe, her face extremely white apart from the bright spots of color on both cheeks. 

“I need to lie down,” she says quietly, her voice subdued, absent of whimsy.

“Yes, that’s probably wise,” he says.

Grace nods slowly, and stays where she is. Harold takes half a step towards her. 

“Do—would you like some help?”

“Hmm?” She blinks at him, her expression curious, a little concerned.

Harold Wren has the numbers of at least three doctors who are always happy to make house calls when asked to do so by extremely wealthy men. He could have one of them here within the hour. Less.

He swallows.

“Come on.” He crosses the room briskly and reaches for her, tucking her arm into his. “Let’s get you settled.”

Harold hasn’t had a fixed permanent residence since he was sharing a cheap industrial loft with Nathan and Olivia in the early eighties. But a couple of weeks ago, he began preparing Harold Martin’s house to eventually receive Grace as a visitor, which means that he lives there now, for all practical purposes. 

The closet in the master bedroom of his Village brownstone is larger than Grace’s bedroom by at least 5 square feet.

Her bed is a mattress on the floor, covered in a simple blue quilt. There’s a waterfall of string lights tacked to the wall in lieu of a headboard, and a clothesline pinned to the ceiling where her clothing hangs. Books stacked five wide and four deep form a makeshift bedside table.

“Welcome to my boudoir,” she says, gesturing grandly with her free arm.

“It’s lovely,” he says, because that is the simple truth. She makes all sorts of things lovely that have no right to be.

Harold leads her to the mattress, turning back the covers, arranging her few pillows. She crawls into her small nest so deeply that only her eyes and the top of her head and the pink tip of her nose are visible. Harold gingerly lowers himself to sit on the floor next to her. He’s usually pretty good at convincing himself that the difference in their ages is insignificant, but today he would just be fooling himself. He can already hear his hips creaking.

Not that he minds in the least. There’s nowhere he’d rather be.

“You look quite cozy,” he says, feeling cocooned by the gentle warmth of his own intense fondness for the unlikely creature peeking at him over her blanket.

“I am.” She watches him. “This is nice. I never had anyone do this for me before.”

Harold tells himself sternly that it isn’t appropriate to be pleased by this, simply because it makes him distinctive.

“I always want Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and ginger ale when I get sick, despite their complete lack of medicinal or nutritive properties,” he says lightly. “I suppose nothing makes us long for the simple comforts of childhood quite like a relatively minor illness.”

She snorts lightly. “I’ll take your word for it. Nothing comfortable about my childhood.”

Harold’s mouth drops open, but her eyes are already beginning to shut.

“You’re a good man, Harold Martin,” she murmurs, pushing her hand towards him until he traps it between his own. “I hope I’m not gonna make you get sick.”

A minute later, she’s unresponsive to the sound of her name. A few minutes after that, her breathing becomes deep and even.

Harold continues holding her hand. When he gets to his feet again, it’s to collect the thermometer.

And, perhaps, his thoughts, which are suddenly racing.

At the door, he pauses, turns to glance back over the room. Then he performs the same scan of the living room walls, the countertops and tables, and he realizes something.

In Grace’s apartment, there is not one single photograph of her family to be found anywhere. She doesn’t have many personal photos in general, but above her drawing table, which occupies the place where a television might usually go, there’s a snapshot of Grace and the two women with whom she’d shared an apartment when she was a student at RISD. 

The only other photograph is an aging polaroid of what appears to be an extremely large and unusually old tree. 

The absence of family pictures seems glaring, now that he’s paying attention. It’s not as if Grace were orphaned at a young age. Both her parents are still living in South Carolina, in the house where she and her brother grew up.

She doesn’t talk about them, but he never thought…

Harold sits down abruptly at the drawing table, looking out the window at an unprepossessing view of a brick wall and a fire escape. 

_You thought you knew everything about her._

One woman on the whole promenade with no dark secrets. This hardly qualified, did it? A man fleeing a treason charge under a relentless string of false identities had a secret. A woman whose childhood had been—neglectful? Abusive? No, he can’t even think about that, he’s already breathing fast. There’s a difference, that’s the material point. An unhappy childhood is a tragedy, not a shame. The Machine had no reason to bring it to his attention. 

Really, he’s the last person on earth with any right to feel blindsided. He knew the titles of every book she’d checked out of the library for the last ten years before she so much as knew his name.

(She _still_ doesn’t know his name.)

Harold retrieves the thermometer and carries it back into the bedroom, kneeling next to the bed as Grace stirs sleepily.

“Shh, it’s all right,” he says, checking the reading. Her fever is down to 102. He huffs in relief, then slumps with his back against the wall.

Once he’d compared her to a Faberge egg, rare and fragile. Really, she’s like kintsugi pottery: she’d been broken long before they met, and somehow, with a skill and artistry that might as well be magic for all Harold can hope to understand it, she’d mended the pieces of herself with pure gold.

He’s not a coward, but sitting here, thinking about a little girl with red hair whose hand nobody had held when she was sick, he suddenly understands the temptations of cowardice. A very small part of him badly wants to run away, because if he ends up hurting her now, with all his secrets and lies, it will unmake him. 

And if anyone else should ever hurt her, Harold will probably destroy them. He generally tries not to dwell on the fact that he possesses that kind of power; he’d assumed that nothing could tempt him to use it. Nathan probably had a point when he suggested that isolation made Harold a little naive about certain things.

On impulse, he picks up Grace’s hand, pressing it to his lips. Her nails are a soft shade of coral this week, a little chipped around the nail beds. There’s a fleck of aqua colored paint on her wrist that didn’t come off in the shower, and an old, jagged scar on her right pointer finger below the knuckle.

This is what it means to be humbled, Harold supposes. Oddly enough, he feels gratified as well. A certain clarity is settling over him. He’s never going to be worthy of Grace. Anything he can give her will be less than she deserves, so—why not consider that license to try and outdo himself? Discreetly, of course. Her birthday’s next month. He’s been racking his brain for weeks on the subject of presents, trying to strike a middle ground between _too much_ and _not good enough._ But if he just approaches the problem differently…

Harold checks that Grace is still sleeping soundly. He can feel the heat from her face against his palm before he even touches her, but her temperature is holding steady. She’ll be a few days fighting this off, he suspects, but that’s fine. He can afford to take a few days.

Seated at the table in the kitchen, he opens Grace’s laptop. _The Wounded Deer_ is her desktop wallpaper; an hour ago, he’d simply chalked it up to her love of surrealism. Improving her system security will be his project for the afternoon, but first, Harold Wren is going to send an email to the curator of the Guggenheim collection in Venice. 

He startles, almost guiltily, when the webcam light blinks on, a Cyclopean eye at the top of the screen. It’s a courtesy only. The Machine doesn’t need to activate the light in order to activate the camera. It’s just saying hello, he thinks.

“Did you know?” The question slips out before he can stop himself. “About—her family?”

The screen blanks. Soon he’s looking at low-res video footage taken from a security camera positioned over the door of a synagogue in Queens. The door opens, and people begin emerging one by one, or in clusters of two and three. Grace walks out, and the door shuts behind her. Harold can see the hand-lettered sign taped up at eye level: _Adult Children of Alcoholics, support group meeting, 7:00 pm_.

He looks away quickly, like that will stop it from hurting. “I thought so,” he murmurs. “You were protecting her, weren’t you. Even from me.”

The Machine makes no attempt at a reply, but confirmation would be redundant.

“I want you to create a new protocol,” he says. “A privacy filter. Starting today, administrators have no access to Grace Hendrick’s personal data. Nobody sees it, except you.” 

The green dot blinks softly at him, but it would be pure anthropomorphic folly to think of it as a sign of approval.

“The privacy filter has one exception,” he adds, in a rush. “If she is ever in danger, you’re to alert me immediately. Or, if I’m unavailable for any reason, alert the person best suited to taking action. I’m sure you’ll be able to find someone, you’re—” 

He clears his throat. “You’re _really good_ at finding people.”

“Harold? Are you talking to someone?”

Grace peers at him from the doorway through sleepy, squinted eyes. He leaps to his feet. The webcam light blinks off. 

“Just thanking a colleague who tracked down a valuable resource for me,” he says. “Let me get you that cup of tea I promised.”

**Author's Note:**

> [The Angel Oak, South Carolina](https://poesypluspolemics.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/angel-oak-medium-web.jpg)
> 
> [kintsugi](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/bowl-1.jpg)
> 
> [The Wounded Deer](https://cultura.biografieonline.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Cervo-ferito-Cerbiatto-Frida-Kahlo.jpg)


End file.
